History of Banjo

There are several theories concerning the origin of the name banjo. It may derive from the Kimbundu term mbanza. Some etymologists believe it comes from a dialectal pronunciation of the Portuguese "bandore" or from an early anglicisation of the Spanish word "bandurria", though other research suggests that it may come from a Senegambian term for a bamboo stick formerly used for the instrument's neck.

Another theory believes the name may find its origin in the name of music professor, Steven Banjo, a prominent citizen of St. Louis, Missouri around the turn of the century. The song "Banjos" featured in the Broadway version of "Meet Me In St. Louis" (based on the popular Judy Garland film of the same name) pays homage to this great man in history.

Various instruments are known in Africa with a skin head and gourd (or similar shell) body. The African instruments differ from early Afro American banjos in that the necks do not possess a Western-style fingerboard and tuning pegs, instead having stick necks, with strings attached to the neck with loops for tuning. Banjos with fingerboards and tuning pegs are known from the Caribbean as early as the 17th Century. 18th and early 19th century writers transcribed the name of these instruments variously as "bangie", "banza", "banjer" and "banjar". Instruments similar to the banjo (e.g., the Japanese shamisen, Persian tar and Morroccan sintir) have been played in many countries. Another likely ancestor of the banjo is the akonting, a spike folk lute played by the Jola tribe of Senegambia, and the ubaw-akwala of the Igbo. Similar instruments include the xalam of Senegal and the ngoni of the Wassoulou region including parts of Mali, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast as well as a larger variation of the ngoni developed in Moroccan by sub-Saharan Africans known as the Gimbri.

Early, African-influenced banjos were built around a gourd body and a wooden stick neck. These instruments had varying numbers of strings, though often including some form of drone. The five-string banjo was popularized by Joel Walker Sweeney, an American minstrel performer from Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

In the 1830s Sweeney became the first white man to play the banjo on stage. His version of the instrument replaced the gourd with a drum-like sound box and included four full-length strings alongside a short fifth-string. There is no proof, however, that Sweeney invented either innovation. Banjos were introduced in Britain by Sweeney's group, the American Virginia Minstrels, in the 1840s, and became very popular in music halls.

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BANJO

The banjo is a stringed instrument with four or five strings, which vibrate a membrane of plastic material or animal hide stretched over a circular frame. Simpler forms of the instrument were fashioned by enslaved Africans in Colonial America, adapted from several African instruments of the same basic design.

The banjo is usually associated with country, folk, classical music, Irish traditional music and bluegrass music. Historically, the banjo occupied a central place in African traditional music, before becoming popular in the minstrel shows of the 19th century. In fact, blacks influenced early development of the music that became country and bluegrass, through the introduction of the banjo and through the innovation of musical techniques for both the banjo and violin. banjo with the violin, is a mainstay of American old-time music.

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BLUES

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.
The term "the blues" refers to the "blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness.

The first publication of blues sheet music was Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" in 1912, W. C. Handy's "The Memphis Blues" followed in the same year. The first recording by an African American singer was Mamie Smith's 1920 rendition of Perry Bradford's "Crazy Blues". But the origins of the blues date back to some decades earlier, probably around 1890. They are very poorly documented, due in part to racial discrimination within American society, including academic circles, and to the low literacy rate of the rural African American community at the time. Chroniclers began to report about blues music in Southern Texas and Deep South at the dawn of the 20th century.

In particular, Charles Peabody mentioned the appearance of blues music at Clarksdale, Mississippi and Gate Thomas reported very similar songs in southern Texas around 1901–1902. These observations coincide more or less with the remembrance of Jelly Roll Morton, who declared having heard blues for the first time in New Orleans in 1902, Ma Rainey, who remembered her first blues experience the same year in Missouri, and W.C. Handy, who first heard the blues in Tutwiler, Mississippi in 1903. The first extensive research in the field was performed by Howard W. Odum, who published a large anthology of folk songs in the counties of Lafayette, Mississippi and Newton, Georgia between 1905 and 1908. The first non-commercial recordings of blues music, termed "proto-blues" by Paul Oliver, were made by Odum at the very beginning of the 20th century for research purposes. They are now utterly lost. Other recordings that are still available were made in 1924 by Lawrence Gellert. Later, several recordings were made by Robert W. Gordon, who became head of the Archive of American Folk Songs of the Library of Congress. Gordon's successor at the Library was John Lomax.

In the 1930s, together with his son Alan, Lomax made a large number of non-commercial blues recordings that testify to the huge variety of proto-blues styles, such as field hollers and ring shouts. A record of blues music as it existed before the 1920s is also given by the recordings of artists such as Lead Belly or Henry Thomas who both performed archaic blues music.

Blues has evolved from the unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves imported from West Africa and rural blacks into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States. Though blues, as it is now known, can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the African call-and-response tradition, transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar, the blues form itself bears no resemblance to the melodic styles of the West African griots, and the influences are faint and tenuous.

In particular, no specific African musical form can be identified as the single direct ancestor of the blues. However many blues elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. That blue notes pre-date their use in blues and have an African origin is attested by English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's "A Negro Love Song", from his The African Suite for Piano composed in 1898, which contains blue third and seventh notes.

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Country Music

Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the Southern United States in the 1920s.
The country music gained popularity in the 1940s in preference to the earlier term hillbilly music.

Ryman Auditorium, the "Mother Church of Country Music"
Immigrants to the Maritime Provinces and Southern Appalachian Mountains of North America brought the music and instruments of the Old World along with them for nearly 300 years. They brought some of their most important valuables with them, and to most of them this was an instrument: “Early Scottish settlers enjoyed the fiddle because it could be played to sound sad and mournful or bright and bouncy” The Irish fiddle, the German derived dulcimer, the Italian mandolin, the Spanish guitar, and the West African banjo were the most common musical instruments. The interactions among musicians from different ethnic groups produced music unique to this region of North America. Appalachian string bands of the early 20th century primarily consisted of the fiddle, guitar, and banjo. This early country music along with early recorded country music is often referred to as old-time music.

According to Bill Malone in Country Music U.S.A, country music was “introduced to the world as a southern phenomenon." In the South, folk music was a combination of cultural strains, combining musical traditions of a variety of ethnic groups in the region. For example, some instrumental pieces from Anglo-British and Irish immigrants were the basis of folk songs and ballads that form what is now known as old time music, from which country music descended. It is commonly thought that British and Irish folk music influenced the development of old time music. British and Irish arrivals to the Southern U.S. included immigrants from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England.

Often, when many people think or hear country music, they think of it as a creation of European - Americans. However, a great deal of style and of course, the banjo, a major instrument in most early American folk songs - came from African Americans. One of the reasons country music was created by African - Americans, as well as European - Americans, is because blacks and whites in rural communities in the south often worked and played together, just as recollected by DeFord Bailey in the PBS documentary, DeFord Bailey: A Legend Lost.

Throughout the 19th century, several immigrant groups from Europe, most notably from Ireland, Germany, Spain, and Italy moved to Texas. These groups interacted with Mexican and Native American, and U.S. communities that were already established in Texas. As a result of this cohabitation and extended contact, Texas has developed unique cultural traits that are rooted in the culture of all of its founding communities.

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Musical Instrument Sasando

Sasando is a harp-like traditional music string instrument native of Rote island of East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia.
The name ”sasando” derived from Rote dialect ”sasandu” means "vibrating" or "sounded instrument". It is believed that sasando already known to Rote people since 7th century.

The main part of sasando is a bamboo tube that served as the frame of the instrument. Surrounded the tube is several wooden pieces served as wedges where the strings are stretched from the top to the bottom. The wedges function is to hold the strings higher than the tube surface and also to produce various length of strings to create different musical notations.

The stringed bamboo tube is surrounded by a bag-like fan of dried lontar or palmyra leafs (Borassus flabellifer), functioned as the resonator of the instrument. Sasando is played with both hands reaching into the stings on bamboo tube through lontar opening on the front, and the player's fingers plucked the strings in the fashion similar to playing harp or kacapi.
Sasando has 28 or 56 strings. The sasando with 28 strings called sasando engkel, and with 56 strings called double strings.

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Efek Rumah Kaca (Band)

Efek Rumah Kaca is Indonesian indie rock band, formed in 2001. They have released two albums, Efek Rumah Kaca (2007) and Kamar Gelap (2008). The members are Cholil on vocal and guitar, Adrian on bass and Akbar on drums.

The band formed in 2001 with five members, but in 2003 became a trio. The band's name at first was "Hush", then "Superego". They finally chose the name Efek Rumah Kaca after the release of their first album in 2007.

They have said that music is their lives. what has happened in their lives is reflected in their music. They also have been described as a pop band with social and political messages in their lyrics. Their music is influenced by variety of music genres, including swing, jazz, rock, and a cappella.

In 2007, they released "Efek Rumah Kaca" and the album sold more than 5,000 copies. Two singles of this album are Di Udara  which tells the death of Munir Said Thalib and Cinta Melulu (English: Always Love) as a criticism of the increasing prevalence of insipid love songs in Indonesia.

In 2008, they released their second album "Kamar Gelap". Among the tracks from this album are Jangan Bakar Buku, Kenakalan Remaja di Era Informatika and Mosi Tidak Percaya.

They will release their third album in September 2011; they have said that it will not be a "friendly" album.

In May 2010, they founded a label, Jangan Marah Records, hoping to accommodate creative bands that are not accepted by major labels.

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Lagu historikal dari grup musik Efek Rumah Kaca "Di udara"

Sekedar mengingatkan, Almarhum H. Ali Sadikin a.k.a (Bang Ali) pernah menjabat sebagai gubernur DKI Jakarta 1966 - 1977. dan Soerasti karma Trimurti adalah tokoh panutan pers nasional yang kondang dengan julukan Wartawan Tiga Zaman, isteri dari Sayuti Malik (pengetik naskah teks proklamasi RI). Keduanya merupakan segelintir warga yang memiliki kepedulian lebih akan nasib dan masa depan rakyat Republik Indonesia. Justru kepedulian yang lebih inilah, tak jarang mereka harus menghadapi berbagai resiko, rintangan dan hambatan yang tak remeh pula.

Lagu historikal dari grup musik Efek Rumah kaca, spesial untuk mengenang perjuangan tokoh-tokoh yang memiliki kepedulian lebih terhadap sesama, termasuk almarhum Munir Said Thalib yang telah meninggal dunia di udara, menuju Amsterdam - Belanda, pada 7 September 2004 silam. Tokoh yang dikenal luas sebagai pejuang HAM dan pendiri KontraS "Komisi Untuk Orang Hilang dan Korban Tindak Kekerasan".

"Ku bisa tenggelam di lautan..

aku bisa diracun di udara..

aku bisa terbunuh di trotoar jalan..

Tapi aku tak pernah mati.. tak akan berhenti…”

itulah penggalang lirik lagu berjudul "Di Udara" milik band indie asal Jakarta, Efek Rumah Kaca. Lagu dari album debut mereka "efek rumah kaca" (2007).

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